1. Field
The present invention relates to an image forming device such as a copier, a printer, and a facsimile machine, and a control method of controlling image forming devices.
2. Background Art
When a plurality of printers is delivered, each printer is generally set equally with the same setting data. This shipping method is known as “kitting”. However, as the number of printers increases, it takes a lot of time for a manufacturer to install the setting data manually for all the printers one by one from the beginning to an end item. If failure or trouble occurs with a printer, a user temporally replaces that printer with a backup printer. Further, the printer must be set again from the beginning so that the printer can be used again for an extended period of time.
One example of a background-art printer employs a detachable memory card to store setting information. The setting information is loaded in a storage device mounted on a board. Even if a failure requiring replacement of the board occurs, one such example background image forming device called a label printer may recover easily in the following way: In the label printer, the setting and history information is stored in the storage device mounted on a board such as a SRAM (static random access memory). Further, the setting and the history information is also stored in the detachable memory card. A variety of setting information for controlling print-operation and history information related to print operation is stored in the memory card with a file format readable on computers such as a host computer, a personal computer, and so on.
In another image forming device, setting information, which is stored in an external storage device and valid only for the image forming device, is selectively downloaded. Thus, the image forming device can prevent wrong information from being applied to the image forming device because a backup operation with internal information of the image forming device using external storage device, a reconstruction operation, and a copy operation are properly performed.
Criteria information is stored in the internal storage device to determine whether or not information stored in the external storage device can be used for operation of the image forming device. An information-processing controller determines whether or not the information stored in the external storage device is the information to be used for the operation of the image forming device, based on the information stored in the internal storage device and the information stored in the external storage device. Further, the information stored in the external storage device is used only when the information-processing controller determines that the information stored in the external storage device is the information to be used for the operation of the image forming device.
However, in the background-art image forming device, the setting data (binary data) is stored in text format in the external storage device. Consequently, the setting data can only be transferred to another image forming device which uses the same text format.